Weird Fic Picks #1 - Junji Ito

In the first of our Weird Fic Picks, Jon talks about one of his favourite horror writers - Junji Ito, creator of Uzumaki and Gyo.

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Transcript (approximate):

Hi, I’m Jon - I’m writer on The Silt Verses and the voice of David in I Am In Eskew, and this is Weird Fic Picks, our Patreon-exclusive series where the cast and crew give our recommendations and thoughts on the horror, weird fiction, science fiction, and dark fantasy that we really love.

Heavy spoilers will always follow for the work in question, so please be aware. And on this particular recommendation - it goes in really hard with the gore and the body horror, so please be aware.

And this is someone I’ve spoken about before as an obvious and very big influence on Eskew; I’m going to tackle Junji Ito, the great horror manga writer.

There are two things I adore about Junji Ito, and these are completely subjective qualities.

Number one is his embrace of Ovidian, transformative mania.

He’s so often over-simplified as the guy whose punchlines are something gross or a scary nightmare face across a full-page panel, and he’s very good at that, but his ultimate concerns are absolutely existential.

There’s nothing very interesting or frightening, in my mind, about horror where the ultimate outcome is only death.

Because there’s always relief associated with death, and so the only really horrible thing about it is if it happens in an unpleasant or painful way, which to horror fans can often be a celebratory thing in itself - a bit of splatter.

Ito instead describes a world where you may encounter a spiral symbol that is so beautiful and so thoroughly overwhelming in its spiral-ness that you begin obsessively sculpting spiral pottery, trying to capture what you’ve witnessed, eventually transforming yourself into a spiral just to embody it more perfectly-

The threat to us is not really death or violence.

The threat is purification, an act of change so radical that our impure selves would be destroyed in the process, forcing us into a new cycle of existence that is both endless and inhuman in its single-mindedness.

A compulsion so powerful that it becomes physically and spiritually transformative in nature.

Sean T. Collins actually wrote an article about something quite similar to this back in February on The Outline, and he called it ‘transcendental horror’, citing Hereditary, Midsommar, the Witch, and the Lighthouse as modern examples.

Which is a nice term for this kind of work in which the entity that threatens the eradication of ourselves is also offering liberation from ourselves, and rather than being something that exclusively repels or frightens us, it’s something we might fall in love with.

We’ve all felt an attraction to something so powerful and so pure that it threatens to overwhelm and consume our fragile, impure sense of self.

Whether it’s a peer who seems more confident and fully formed than ourselves, whether it’s an infatuation, or even a more literal addiction that becomes our sole focus.

For me, Ito is always creating art about that longing for fulfilment that’s innate in each of us, and he seems to be fascinated by how that longing might warp and reshape us into something that is fulfilled but utterly unrecognisable.

Speaking of which - the second thing I love about Junji Ito is his embrace of the absurd. He’s a very funny writer.

And horror is funny.

I think every good horror writer realises that.

Even Thomas Ligotti, who’s often cast as this joyless pessimist babbling in a corner about the meaninglessness of existence, realises that horror is funny.

Which is why I think his best stories draw on this 20th century stable of absurdist authors, Kafka and Beckett and Bruno Schulz who are great humorists, rather than on Lovecraft, who quite apart from anything else was a deeply unfunny man except for the penguins.

Horror can be a deranged cackle at the apparently random and disorganised cruelties and ironies of the universe, or it can be an attempt to satirise the fundamentally inhuman mechanisms underlying our lives.

But it can also be someone saying, ‘hey, what if there was a hole in a cliff that fit your bodily proportions exactly, and you became consumed with the longing to fit yourself into that hole because it was such a perfect match for you?’

Or, ‘what if there was a giant balloon with your own grinning face on it, and its only desire was to chase after you and lynch you?’

Or simply, ‘what if there was an infectious disease that turned you into a colossal snail?’

These are very funny ideas, let’s not be shy about it.

Because horror is allowed to adhere to nightmare logic rather than grounded logic, it has that absolute freedom. It can express itself with a wild, weird creativity that even the other fantastical genres struggle with, because there have to be rules in your invented fantasy or science-fiction worlds, right?

Horror should always be brave enough to attempt at that nightmare logic; to be outlandish and experimental and see what lands, which is why people who sneer at Stephen King for writing about a killer laundromat or killer trucks are half missing the point (but only half because I’m sorry, the Mangler isn’t funny or scary)

And certainly a challenge moving from I Am In Eskew to the Silt Verses has been suddenly writing in a world where I can’t just do whatever the hell I want.

Where I need to establish some base rules.

Recommendations:

If you’re new to Junji Ito, I would start with The Mystery of Amigara Fault, because it’s short and wildly original and perfect and if you don’t love it, I think that’s a good place to drop out with no harm done.

Next go for Uzumaki, which is his masterpiece - a collection of interconnected shorts about the town that becomes obsessed with, and transformed by, the spiral pattern.

There’s a problem that exists throughout much of longform horror, which is that to avoid running out of creative possibilities you either need to create a thematically and tonally tight threat - a haunted house or a serial killer - which often necessitates a bit of a slow-burn and can end up feeling limited or monotonous.

Or you find a way of varying it up, which often means that creators end up going for an all-out anthology format where it’s zombies this week and ghosts the next week, which has its own attendant limitations, because you need to create a framework where the protagonists can be encountering something different week after week or chapter after chapter.

And that problem and that tension is how you end up with works that try and do a bit of both, or even narrative sequences that end up shattering your carefully constructed tone and sense of threat, like having topiary hedge-maze monsters suddenly pop up in The Shining.

Uzumaki really solves that conundrum for me, absolutely and fundamentally, by forming a series of distinct horror sequences around a shape, a pattern, which allows for infinite variety and shifts in tone without ever losing that clear thematic through-line of the spiral.

Some stories are better than others, there are a few that just don’t work, but there are endless riches and inventions within it.

Recommendation number two: Gyo, in which a fishy apocalypse marches onto the land and an all-pervading stink fills the air, is definitely a work that gets referenced strongly in the Silt Verses.

And again, it’s that outlandishness that makes it work. The ocean floor is ripe with possibilities for weird fiction, but to date as a genre, I think we’ve too often got hung up on the alien nature of tentacles, the influence of Cthulu, which at this point is feeling pretty tired and kitschy.

It takes courage for a creator to say ‘I will show you fear in the round, polished eye and open mouth of a tuna.’ And then to make it work is the astonishing thing.

Although, honestly, this is one I probably love in principle rather than in practice as a multi-part story. Compared to Uzumaki I find the narrative a bit mean-spirited and one-track in how its characters suffer; there’s also a certain weary inevitability to how it builds and builds, and not a huge amount of surprises along the way.

But even if it is one-track, that track, which is ‘what if fish had mechanical crab-legs and they invaded land?’ is in itself unbeatable, I think.

Tomie is often seen as Ito’s third masterpiece, but I find this one difficult to love. It depicts a mysterious, demanding, and beautiful woman who holds such dreadful power over men that they are supernaturally compelled to butcher her - but she regenerates herself, coming back to life in order to lure other lovers to their doom.

I’ve read some very thoughtful and clever essays interpreting this as actually, an ironic, anti-misogynistic narrative, with Tomie as a deliberately cartoonish and superficial character who plays the victim in order to skewer men’s self-justifications for their own violence against women.

I have to admit that I struggle to see this interpretation as fully intentional on the author’s part, particularly in the context of Junji Ito’s other work, which I do see as tending towards misogynistic stereotyping in places - in Uzumaki, there’s this whole chapter where schoolgirls develop hypnotically ornate hairstyles to attract the attention of boys, and then start jealously pitting themselves against each other.

There’s another recurring short story in which a horrifying-looking woman with shark teeth demands to be taken seriously as a model, to be photographed and told that she looks beautiful - before inevitably devouring the men attempting to work with her.

I can understand, of course, that in all these cases it can be read as a story which upends male credulity and male lust - I just honestly don’t find a huge amount of sympathy in how his female characters are portrayed when they're made monstrous.

But look, I’m reading in translation, I’m certainly ignorant of the specific cultural context in which he was writing, and smarter people than me disagree with me on this, so if you think I’m being unfair or misreading the text, definitely let me know.

Anyway - Mystery of Amigara Fault, followed by Uzumaki, are my recommended starting points.

Thank you so much for watching, and for supporting the Silt Verses on Patreon. If you have any recommendations or comments, please do drop them below.

Catch you again soon.